A classmate of mine made a pretty kick ass Chun-Li and that inspired myself and a some of my classmates to try our hand at making our own Street Fighter characters. I've chosen Ibuki, the ninja girl from Street Fighter 3.
Since I'm not too comfortable using ZSpheres I started modeling the base mesh for the characcter in Maya 2009. This is the seventh thing, I believe, that I've modeled thus far and the first attempt at modeling a woman. I used this tutorial as a jumping off point because it showed a fair bit of process.
I kind of skirted the line between the reference and the artwork.
The torso was based off of a cylinder as were the arms and the legs. Since I'm not too worried about the topology I just boolean'd the cylinders together with spheres to get the shape of the shoulders and the butt and cleaned up the mess as I went along. I didn't want to spend too much time manipulating vertices and what not since I was going to fix it in Zbrush.
I ganked the hands, feet and ears off of xsi man, the head started off as the simple woman's head you can generate from primitive>characters in xsi took them into Maya as obj's and frankenstien'd everything together. The hands, feet and ears are largely the same but the head had to be modified quite a bit. this is what I ended up with this.
I dubbed the base mesh He-Ra Princess of Power. The shoulders were way too large, the neck was too thick from the front view and the head was too long and tall, but that's what Zbrush is for.
After working on the character in Zbrush for a while I ended up having to export my base mesh back into Maya from Zbrush to clean up some of the geo and fix some of the vertices. They weren't quite center and the symmetrical sculpting in Zbrush was getting thrown off. Here's what I have to take back into ZBrush.
Definitely looking a bit more feminine and stylised but the neck looks a little too long, as does the lower half of her body. Nothing I can't fix in ZBrush. Once I get the proportions and the shape exactly where I want them to be I'll take the base mesh back into Maya, fix whatever topology issues the mesh has, create the base mesh for her costume and UV everything so I can normal map it all. I think most of the normal mapping will be done on her clothing but her body will definitely need at least one higher level of subdivision to smooth it all out.
Overall I'm pretty happy with the project up to this point, I've finally started to wrap my head around ZBrush's interface and modeling with ZBrush is so much more fun, artistic even, than the ol' extrude, point/face/edge manipulation.
By the end of next week I hope to have Ibuki ready to be textured and rigged. Then I can move on to learning how to animate in Maya. I can start off with some simple animated poses with Ibuki and then segue into doing full on animation with some downloadable rigs. I want to have an entirely new portfolio and demo reel to take around to all of the studios I've just applied to.
Next week I hope to have a complete or nearly complete modeled/normal mapped character to post.
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